Google Penguin Recovery for small businesses

If you ever thought as a webmaster that Google were on your side that myth may have been blown out of the water with Google Penguin. In the past Google have slowly rolled out changes and seen the effects they have had on sites before rolling them out completely.

It seems with Google Penguin though Google have got fed up with being patient and just rolled out massive algorithm changes with little regard for what websites it effects.

Google say Penguin improves search results for its users but many believe that Google has gone too far and as well as removing a lot of spam sites from results it has punished some good quality sites as well.

The work on setting about your site’s penguin recovery has probably started now if you keep up to date with SEO news. What though about those businesses who have in the past handed over their money to so called experts, many of whom will have used Black Hat techniques to get quick results and get paid?

A lot of business owners who get all or some of their sales online may have seen their traffic and therefore revenues plunge with no idea why and chances are they won’t be signed up to Google Webmaster Tools in order to get notifications of what they have done wrong.

Other website owners may have contributed articles to places like Ezine articles with a link to their sites, these may also be articles from their own sites that means these pages have now been flagged by Google as duplicate content. Again these business owners are unlikely to have the time or the knowledge to sort this problem

If you are a business who has seen your traffic drop and you have come here trying to find out why, then you may want to go back to your SEO professional but you may be best to get someone else in and Penguin recovery starts with getting rid of any links that Google have penalised you for.

If you want to tackle this yourself though the first thing to do is to sign up with Google for Google Webmaster tools. The interface is quite easy to use and you should be able to view any notifications from Google that may include reasons why they have penalized you. You will also be able to see all the links that Google has identified coming to your site, take a look at each of these and try to get any removed that are from poor quality sites with low quality or spam content.

If you have got content that you know appears in a lot of other places online then you may want to take this down as well, you can always rewrite the content: at the same time improving the quality, especially the grammar and punctuation, of your website’s content and making sure that keywords aren’t over used on any page. This may drastically improve your rankings and could even see you reach better positions in Google than you did before.